On Strike at the Software Factory
Since there has been software, there has been the dream of the big green button.
Predictions of the future usually involve elaborate thought-capturing machines that deduce the true desire of an end user and effortlessly create their ideal application, ready for orders, often in the form of a simple form and a big green button promising magic with a label like ‘Go’. This is great for the futurist daydreamer, but terrible for the software developer who lives a life of continuous improvement, watching in horror as their profession is reduced to an afterthought somewhere between waking and the business application someone dreamt up before lunch. This is right around the time that the very emotional craftsmanship debate kicks in, and the humans vs. machines themes spring to awkward, robotic life.
Since the term "software factories" was coined in the late 60’s by Hitachi, it has been linked inexorably to the manufacturing process it is meant to emulate: people fear that the automation of software components will put developers out of work, or reduce their capacity down to mere assemblers of components rather than authors of code. We hear the buzz in technical communities about the emergence of powerful new software factories, developed by Microsoft and others, and can’t help but wonder if the intended goal of these new innovations is exactly along those lines. Yet, the people most involved in the software factory movement see it as just the opposite, a way to harness factory processes simply to meet the surging global demand for software at all, let alone with chairs to spare.